sparse posting forthcoming

I am convulsed. In this midst of moving, long distance apartment hunting, and unneeded and unwanted boy-related drama (stupid, stupid, stupid), my old idiosyncratic health concern-- which involves some rather unpleasant body-cavity spasms-- has returned. Therefore, until I am actually having coherent, quasi-linear thoughts again, there's not much point in posting any of what's going on in my head.

That said, I did just finish reading The Professor's Daughter--Emily Raboteau-- and I found it pretty friggin' fabulous. My friend Jennifer had recently handed me an essay by Margaret Price that she was reading for one of her writing classes in which Price discusses being a Yankee white lesbian teaching at a primarily black Southern universit -- Spellman in Atlanta. One of her points was that she'd never really had to think about her race all that much until she was put in a position in which she was a minority -- you know, all that old argument about how the biggest portion of white privalege stems from the fact that we just don't have to think about our racial identity every single solitary moment of every single day. So, Raboteau's book kinda explores the nether regions of being biracial and how it colors her every gesture. And it's really pretty relentless. She breaks up her narrative structure now and again -- ie, changing POV, including weird lyrical sections that might be from the inside of her (vegetable-ized) brother's head, and throwing in a paper the main character wrote in college -- I'm not sure if these sorts of maneuverings aren't a smidge gimicky but all-in-all, the texture of her writing is remarkable and her questions and frustrations about her racial identity are palpable. As a first novel, it's worth a look, certainly.

Also, I'm plugging my way through Chan-Wook Park's Vengeance trilogy -- in reverse or in non-release-date order, of course. I saw Lady Vengeance in the theatre and, really, it's just gorgeous in its brutality and humor. What more can you ask of a movie in which the main character's moment of redemption comes when she buries her face in a big gooey white cake, full of icing. It's funny and moving and visceral. Hmmm... food and violence...idea-combinations that have excited me for a long time, yes? And then I rented Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and again, Park, with his kooky, pulpy approach that uses so much blood and gore, manages to keep a fairly meticulous story of circular revenge as his focus. What I mean is, yes, there's a lot of moments that made me flinch but I wasn't so distracted that I lost my thread of trajectory in a complicated plot. And again, his humor is so unexpected and full of pathos: there's one scene in which 4 guys are lined up against a wall jerking off and you hear a woman moaning (don't female wailings generally portend someone is being fucked in a movie?) and then you pan through the wall and see the woman on the other side thrashing around on the floor, obviously in considerable pain while her deaf brother eats some cereal in the foreground. So anyway, these movies are lurid, indeed, but remain fascinating in their meticulous cinematography and storytelling-- and also, their weirdness. I haven't yet seen Oldboy, the middle film in the trilogy-- but hopefully soon, I'll get my hands on a copy. Of course, I do tend to do this thing with writers I fall in love with -- I read up everything I can get my hands on and 3 or 4 or 5 books in, I get bored. Hopefully, I'll make it through the third of these movies without letting that happen.